Netflix’s Christmas release of Witcher: Blood Origin will see the creation of the very first Witcher. And while characters like Geralt will eventually become beings melding magic and humanity, the first Witcher looked a bit different.
Warning: The following interview has some spoilers for the finale of Witcher: Blood Origin.
Actor Laurence O’Fuarain’s character Fjall is a mighty warrior, who ends up taking on that role of the very first Witcher during the final episodes of the season. However, he had to wear a large prosthetic suit for that transformation. It was tough,” O’Fuarain told GameSpot. “And when you have to go into prosthetics for a couple of hours in a chair, it’s never easy, but I mean, you know, part of the parcel. What would happen was I’d get collected from the apartments that I was staying in at about 2 AM, 2:15. And then I’d literally be dropped back at about 10 PM because once you get it on, you have to shoot all day, and then you have to take everything off. And like my makeup artist, Valentin, he had to be there before I was there, so I can’t complain. He had it the roughest. That was just part of the job.”
Working all day while wearing prosthetics was known to O’Fuarain, but what wasn’t known, going in, was how he’d smell after working all day. “I think for me, the takeaway from it was the smell,” explained O’Fuarain. “The suit that I had to wear at the end–it just stank. And I think that was partly from how much I was sweating in it, and partly from the material that it was made from. But there were very lonely days because I had a bit of a ring of loneliness around me because most of the crew and cast kind of stayed fairly far away.”
While it may have been lonely those days, O’Fuarain said that he enjoyed wearing the suit and that he felt “beastly.”
Witcher: Blood Origin is currently available on Netflix. The four-part show takes place 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher series–and Blood Origin leads to the creation of the very first Witcher. The show stars O’Fuarain, Sophia Brown, Zach Wyatt, Michelle Yeoh, and Nathaniel Curtis. It also features Francesca Mills as a warrior with her very own warhammer, which now sits in her bedroom, and the introduction to a new character played by Minnie Driver.
The series is written and produced by Lauren Hissirch and Declan De Barra, both of whom worked on The Witcher as showrunner and writer, respectively. The series is based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, who was very supportive of Blood Origin.
In addition to the new series and Witcher Season 3 on the horizon, a remake of the first Witcher game is being made in Unreal Engine 5, and it will be open world.
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